No WMDs in Iraq: Is This Still News?

I wouldn't want to see it get overshadowed by the Arnold-groping or Rush-doping stories.

But when I saw the headline "Kay Says No WMD Stock Found in Iraq," my first reaction was, "Is this really still a news story?" This is starting to be like the running joke on the Saturday Night Live news in the 1970s: "Francisco Franco is still dead."

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone," Kay said in a statement obtained by Reuters.

Translation: We haven't found jack. And we don't expect to.

But multiple sources have told the team that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW (chemical warfare) program after 1991," Kay said. And information found so far suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop and produce and fill new chemical warfare weapons was "reduced -- if not entirely destroyed."

Kay concluded that "whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information."

Now Bush is requesting another $600 million as part of the $87 billion supplementary request for Iraq to keep looking for those WMDs. If you need to forge more documents like the "Niger uranium" papers, it can be done much less expensively than that.

It would really be a heck of a lot cheaper to just say, "Okay, we lied."

Tags: iraq war